Jobun the Blogger

Rumahnya boleh jauh, tapi it’s all worth it. Dari Chadstone aja butuh waktu at least 20 menit lewat freeway. Tapi kalo makanannya kayak beginian, jauh apapun ditempuh … no problemo.

Semuanya pada kontribusi makanan nih. Dari Ikan Sambel Balado, Beef Rendang, Udang Pedas, Nasi Tumpeng Lengkap, Mie Goreng, Sambel Goreng, Ayam Goreng, Salad, dan unlimited stock of buah-buahan.

Figure 1: Nasi Tumpeng Komplit.

Figure 2: Ikan Sambal Balado

Figure 3: Hidangan Komplit

I finally managed to finish uploading the photos of our trip to USA. Please visit my gallery to view the pictures.

http://www.jonywijaya.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=13

Saturday, 07th October 2006 - Foods adventures.
Breakfast: none
Lunch: Big portion of Chinese food at Rose Garden for each person.

Afternoon meal: Lots of Dutch Poffertjes at QV with Coffee.
Dinner: 6 portions of Chinese dumplings. Someone was craving for dumplings.

After dinner meal: Instant noodles for everybody.

Supper: Krispy Kreme donuts.

A very simple question: were we really that hungry or just merely greedy?

I am writing this blog because I am having an insomnia tonight. I called my parents overseas asking how they’re doing, and let my mum talking and gossiping as usual, but still not working. So I browse some photos captured by a friend of mine, especially photos about foods.

These photos were taken when we had a bday lunch at Koko in Crown Casino. This is also to show you how much we love japanese foods.

Hotate Misoyaki	Sushi & Sashimi Platter	Sakana Shioyaki
The photos were by courtesy of Felix Irawan

We went to this laser clinic to begin a skin care treatment for my gf. Apparently, the clinician did not recommend her to take the laser-kind of treatment, considering the heat and the radition that could make her facial condition got even worse. So the clinician introduced a new method of skin care treatment called Micro Dermabrasion or they are used to calling it MD treatment which is very gentle, non-surgical, less risk and doesn’t produce heat or laser-like-radition treatment.

Basically, what MD does is to remove dead or flaking skin cells, and create an immediate improvement in the skin’s appearance by stimulating the production of fresh young skin cells and collagen. Each MD treatment takes about 40 to 45 minutes, for me it’s quite a long treatment especially when you sit there doing nothing and watch someone else being treated but not you.

Each basic MD treatment costs AUD$150.00, and if you pay in advance for 5 treatments, you will get 1 free treatment. However, along each treatment you will be expected to spend more money for the skin care products like cleanser, toner, moisturiser, and so on, not to mention the skin peeling program later on. You may expect to spend about AUD$1,500.00 minimum.

I can’t wait to see my older brother getting married this year. Airfares - paid, Disneyland & Universal Studio tickets - paid, Auckland New Zealand Accommodation & Car Hire (during transit) - also paid, Annual Leave - applied, and US Visitor Visa - granted. Lots of money have been spent, I must admit, but it’s all worth it. This year, I will spend the rest of my US trips holiday in California. My girlfriend is currently making the holiday plans (mostly foods and places to eat), and I ain’t have anything to do with those plans. Lucky me! :-p
Frankly speaking, I haven’t seen my older brother (Tony) since early 1998. The last time I saw him when he was packing his luggage in preparation to leave Melbourne, Australia for good. He did not quite make it in Australia. Pretty long story to tell.

Anyway, I am so looking forward to this coming holiday trips. I am dying for a little break, and far…far… away from work.

Last weekend I watched the Wachoswki Brothers’ adaptation of Alan Moore’s - V for Vendetta (the movie), directed by James McTeigue on DVD. I have never read or even knowing that the movie was based on the original graphic novel. The movie delivers a moral story that a dictatorship will not last longer, because hatred, revenge, and rebellion always come in between. Who on earth could bare to live in a country where racial and sexual discriminations were in place in such a way to control people (although I know some countries that are still having problems with racial & sexual discriminations issue), and even worst privacy abuses. Imagine our real life was like in a Big Brother TV where our every conversation was being taped, and our every movement was being monitored.

The baseline of the movie is about political issue and human right crisis, and I was expecting less action-like movie. But the last part of the movie where they showed the slow-motion fight scene has amazed me (although for some viewers that scene was the lamest part of the movie). The matrix-like fight scene never bores me.

Ever since I started working with this company, I have seen a lot of unique behaviours of people. Although sometimes I found them funny behaviours, but they were also insulting ones.

Dealing with customers face-to-face had never been in my agenda in my previous working experience. My past roles were always behind-the-scene person who never dealt or even never want to deal with customers directly. This time, I can’t seem to get away with it, since I was being promoted and took over a team leader position. It’s good to be promoted, but it also requires mentality changes. For a non native English tongue like myself, I have found it really challenging. Especially dealing with difficult customers who like to nag/push/whinge/yell and even worst insulting. To avoid any depressions from my side, I always put these kind of customers in the last queue process. The more they whinge, the more likely I put them in the last queue unless the problems that they are currently experiencing, are very urgent and require immediate attentions.

A simple question that always comes into my mind is that ‘are we really that bad in serving customers?’ or ‘is it purely the customers’ behaviour itself?’.

For anybody out there who wants to share the same experience, and may want to contribute advices or opinions or even stories, I will greatly appreciate it and very much welcome.

I have never fell so stupid in my whole life until what happened yesterday at the office. The company that I work for has almost 80 webservers everywhere around the world, and more than 20 webserver machines in Melbourne, Australia. I mostly responsible for those servers which are located in Melbourne.
Since the company launching a new product which is like a wizard of website builder, my life in the office has never been so relax. Lots of customers rang up, and asking hell lot of questions about the new product, and purchased the product via the telephone. The thing about this product was that, we didn’t have a facility to create the users’ account automatically, everything must be done through manual inputs. Yes, I know, it is pain in the butt to do those manual entries.

Apparently, since my job description is a developer working for Innovative Department, I don’t have to do all those data entries. We have a department that does those data entries. Well, here is the story.

One of the guys from that department came to me asking for my help to create him a system that can automate all the data entries, and so I agreed. It took me half a day to develop the system to go live in production. Not long after the system went live, the same guy came back to tell me that another problem had occured. The problem seemed to be from the mail server, he claimed that the mail server stop functioniong ever since I put the system to live, and so I agreed again to look into the problem.

As a software developer, I usually have a lot of windows and servers admin panel opened. Because of this bad habit, the stupidity began. Let’s assume that the server which had the problem is called .37 server, and the server which had no problem is called .12 server. Instead of working on .37, I unknowingly worked on .12, and got my ass on this server. Because of working on a wrong server, everything looked slightly different, and some configurations were missing. My head was sweating because there were quite few customers in that server, and I screwed the server up (so I thought). In my head, I didn’t think of solutions about how to fix the problem anymore, but to think about how to talk to our customers that we screwed up the server, and apologise to them. We were worried to death that day.

Suddenly, I began to realise something was different about .12 server. How come it didn’t have the usual structure like any other servers, and so I checked the IP address of this server. Realising that we were working on the wrong server, made us looked like an idiot. I just laughed to myself so loud that I actually fell for my own stupidity and the bad habit I had.

I got a moral lesson from this experience that I should look before I do. What a day…what a day!

Another friend of mine is leaving Australia for good. It is sad to think that we will hardly see each other again, but we must support her choice of leaving Australia to seek a better career and future in her homeland. Considering that she might be really busy preparing and packing her things before leaving Australia, we decided to have an early farewell dinner in a Thai restaurant called Thai Taste located on Johnston St, Collingwood. We had such a great time together, and I wish you good luck, and all the best for whatever you do or want to do.

P.S: Thanks again for the circus tickets. We really had fun there, didn’t we?